Posts tagged with "BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group":

Long after the golden era of corporate modernist skyscrapers (think Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, SOM’s Lever House, and so on), many contemporary office skyscrapers are still designed with traditional glass curtain walls that have low insulation and cause overheating from unnecessary direct sunlight. Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) conjured an otherworldly alternative for Shenzhen International Energy Mansion: a sawtooth, zigzagging curtain wall comprising glass panels and powder-coated aluminum that blocks direct sunlight, thereby reducing solar gain by up to 30 percent.
The 1-million-square-foot structure is composed of two towers and a nine-story connecting block complete with a shared cafeteria, conference rooms, and various retail shops: The uppermost 13 floors of the 42-story north tower houses the Shenzhen Energy Mansion headquarters. As a starting point, BIG considered the subtropical climate in Shenzhen, gauging how they could create comfortable working spaces in hot and humid conditions while at the same time reducing energy consumption. The solution? A passive facade. “Our proposal for Shenzhen Energy Mansion enhances the sustainable performance of the building drastically by only focusing on its envelope, the facade,” said Andreas Klok Pedersen, partner and design director at BIG.
Collaborating with Transsolar, the design studio dedicated to addressing climate change, the firm employed various solutions to reduce solar-derived heat and glare without relying on machines or heavy glass coating (which would make views out seem gray and bleak). The building has achieved two out of three stars with the Chinese Green Building Evaluation Label and a LEED Gold rating. BIG and Transsolar developed a multifaceted passive program with a facade folded in an origami-like shape consisting of closed and open subsections. The closed sections provide high insulation values by blocking direct sunlight.
“With solid facade panels on the southeast and southwest side for shading, the glazed facade facing northwest and northeast is able to achieve high sustainability requirements with more clarity and less coating,” said Pedersen. All in all, the effect enhances the environmentally sustainable performance of the building and creates an office mise-en-scène bathed in soft light reflected from the direct sunlight diffused between interior panels.
Meanwhile, the double glazing applied to the low-e tempered Super Energy-Saving Insulated Glass Units (IGU) by Shanghai Yaohua Pilkington Glass on the folded facade provides open views through the clear glass in one direction via a series of simple deformations in the geometry that allows for larger openings. These interjecting pockets of glass create cavernous folds that interrupt the smooth facade in various interior areas, including lobbies, recreational areas, and meeting areas.
This seemingly precarious arrangement of views is made possible by the aluminum cladding's comprising full-height extruded panels that form a meandering profile. The setup enables the panel system to interlock smoothly, creating a uniform surface with almost seamless joints. A profile of twists and turns accentuates the reflections of light. In effect, these solid facade panels located on the southeast and southwest sides directly obstruct solar penetration. “The amount of insulation used in the curtain wall is a result of optimization between visibility and sustainability,” said Pedersen.
Location: Shenzhen, ChinaArchitect: Bjarke Ingels Group
Consulting Architect: SADI Shenzhen Architecture and Design Institute
Contractor:CSCECEngineer:ARUPFacade Consultants:Front, Inc. and AureconFacade Contractor:Fangda GroupSustainability Consultant:TranssolarGlass Manufacturer, Supplier, Glazing:Shanghai Yaohua Pilkington Glass Group Co., LtdWindows:AumüllerExterior Cladding Panels:Xingfa Aluminum

With a quarter million members in 283 buildings across 75 different cities (and another 183 locations in the pipeline), WeWork is on an expansion tear that’s grown to include retail, education, and maybe even full neighborhoods somewhere down the line. With the company’s first ground-up building, Dock 72, nearly complete in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, AN spoke with the designers and researchers who are making WeWork’s growth possible and tried to divine where the company is going next.
In a conversation on the future of data and workplace design at the William Vale Hotel in Williamsburg, Devin Vermeulen, creative director, and Daniel Davis, director of fundamental research, discussed how WeWork is “refining the future of the open office.”
Most architecture firms design offices as one-off projects and rarely collect feedback once the spaces are occupied, but because WeWork both designs and manages their co-working spaces, the company can collect post-occupancy data. Through the collection of data via user feedback and integrated sensors, the company has created a massive pool of information from which to build its design guidelines.
Planning a floor layout within the constraints of existing buildings can prove challenging, and WeWork is constantly tweaking and updating its offices based on tenant feedback. Every WeWork location outputs a massive amount of what Davis calls “data exhaust,” the information collected as a byproduct of tenants going about their day. Davis points out that data is just a proxy for user interaction, and the feedback collected through WeWork’s room booking app or surveys is just one metric of how their occupants feel.
The design of each location changes accordingly based on a user’s needs. Underutilized conference rooms can either be reconfigured to make them more appealing—cramped rooms can be reorganized, and dark rooms can be lit differently—or repurposed into different uses entirely. There’s no reason that a lesser-used conference room can’t be turned into a lounge if it draws tenants.
Feedback is aggregated and forms the core of WeWork’s design guidelines worldwide. The key to translating those guidelines across 22 countries is that, as the senior vice president and head of design at WeWork, Federico Negro, describes, only 90 percent of the guidelines are used across all offices. The remaining ten percent varies to adapt to local markets.
When WeWork expands into a new city or state, it hires local architects to adapt its traditional model. This might mean a long communal table in Scandinavian offices as everyone gathers to eat lunch together, or larger meeting rooms in China, where one-on-one meetings are eschewed for team gatherings.
The local architectural team is vertically integrated with the maintenance staff and utilizes feedback on trash routes, the ease of changing light bulbs, and other practical considerations when creating a layout. As hyped as the bromance between Bjarke Ingels and WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann has been, the Danish architect won’t be contributing much to the company’s day-to-day architecture work; the first “chief architect” will be focusing his attention on marquee projects like the WeGrow pilot school. The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to help WeWork expand into neighborhood planning, something outside of their current design scope.
WeWork’s furniture and lighting solutions may appear similar to what's used in other spaces, but everything at WeWork is designed and fabricated by in-house teams. The resultant pieces are tested in WeWork offices, tweaked, and rolled out as kits-of-parts for designers to mix and match as they see fit.
On a recent visit to WeWork’s New York City headquarters in Chelsea, the sixth-floor lounge had recently been revamped with plants, technicolor couches, and custom lighting fixtures. The airy palette might have seemed novel to those familiar with the company’s darker coworking spaces of five years ago, but as WeWork grows and matures its aesthetic, what works in the headquarters will ultimately trickle down to its older locations. Negro describes the process as rolling out design like “software updates."
Circulation has been given special emphasis in the company’s design considerations, according to Davis. While his team’s algorithmically-generated desk layouts may optimize the number of seats in a WeWork office, guiding people to navigate those spaces in a certain way helps encourage face-to-face interactions. The most obvious intervention is the staircase; at the Chelsea location, the stairs have been relocated to the center of the floor and connect to floating “sky lobbies." Each floor is anchored by its stair, and circulation flows around it out of necessity. That circulation can help guide and divide the energy of the floor, keeping raucous lounge get-togethers distinct from the more subdued private call booths or conference rooms.
The company is continuing to expand into both new industries and client groups. During the time of writing this story the company announced that it would be jumping into the real estate brokerage game with WeWork Space Services. Enterprise clients like IBM now compose 25 percent of WeWork’s tenants and represent a new design challenge for the company, but having core information from its prior tenants is helping the design team navigate the transition, said Negro.
As open offices continue to evolve, architects and interior designers have tweaked layouts and materials to optimize worker comfort and balance privacy concerns. Will the increasing availability of data help designers refine their solutions in the same way WeWork has done?

The New York City Mayor’s Office canceled the scheduled public groundbreaking of the already-in-construction 40th Precinct Station and instead held a press conference addressing the recent spike in crime in the Bronx and how the new building might help create a more secure and equitable borough.“While crime is at a record low in New York City, there is still more work to do to ensure that every New Yorker feels safe in their neighborhood,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio in a statement. “This new precinct will strengthen the bond between community and police, which will ultimately help make the South Bronx and our City safer.” According to newly released crime statistics from the New York Police Department (NYPD), murders have nearly doubled in the borough in the first half of 2018. Already 51 people have been killed compared to 26 reported homicides in the first half of 2017. Eight of the recent homicides occurred in the 40th Precinct, whereas two happened in the district in 2017. Officials hope the new facility, which will serve the South Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Port Morris, and Melrose, will encourage local residents and the police to work together to bring down such crime in the community. The new Bjarke Ingels Group-designed station will sit at the corner of St. Ann’s Avenue at 547 East 148th Street, just two blocks from one of the most heavily foot-trafficked sites in the city. It will replace the precinct’s current home, a Renaissance Revival structure built in 1922, and move the squad closer to the center of activity in the South Bronx. During this morning’s press hearing, City Council member Rafael Salamanca Jr. noted that the location of the new facility will enhance police presence and oversight near The Hub, the aforementioned busy intersection stocked with retail, restaurants, and mass transit.“I’m thrilled that the new 40th Precinct will be housed in my district,” he said, “and that it will be a much-needed resource near The Hub, which is ground zero for the opioid crisis happening in our city.” The 42,000-square-foot station will feature three levels of space dedicated to officer training, physical fitness, storage, maintenance of gear and vehicles, and the first-ever community events space built in an NYPD facility. This addition to the structure is expected to enhance transparency and communication between the police and the local residents. “Our message to New York going forward is that this is your station house,” said NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill. “We were working in a century-old building that was designed for century-old policing methods. Now we're changing that with a modern facility made for modern, neighborhood policing. Everyone should take pride in not only the jobs they do but where they do them.” Initial plans to design the new building began 10 years ago when the city first tapped Alexander Gorlin Architects to envision the station. After BIG took over the project through the New York Department of Design and Construction's Design Excellence Program, plans to build were finally filed in 2017 to the buildings department. Partial approval was given as of May 1 this year and construction began a few weeks ago, according to the DDC. The $68 million station is expected to be complete in spring 2021.

Bjarke Ingels and Jakob Lange of the Bjarke Ingels Group (and BIG Ideas, the studio's in-house think-tank) have launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for its Burning Man 2018 project. ORB is an 80-foot-wide reflective sphere that, if funded, would bring an elevated mirror, wayfinding symbol, and “temporal monument” to the Black Rock Desert’s Playa in Nevada.
﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿ORB borrows the Earth's form (at 1/500,000th of the scale) to create a 360-degree mirror that will reflect the sky above and goings-on of the Burners below. Although the ORB will be inflatable to reduce the project’s environmental impact, the piece would be hoisted into the air via a 30-ton, 105-foot-tall steel arm.
BIG partner Jakob Lange writes that the installation is a “tribute to mother earth & human expression,” and the piece will seamlessly blend into the desert sky at night as the festival lights dim. Below, the ORB will create a “light shadow” and help visitors navigate the festival's transitory metropolis, the 50,000-strong Black Rock City. The studio is looking to raise $50,000 before the start of this year’s Burning Man, which will run from August 26 through September 3. Backers can pledge to receive engraved stainless steel orbs of varying sizes, with a 40-inch-wide ball going to those who pledge $4,000 or more.
Ingels is no stranger to the mind-expanding arts and culture festival, having thoroughlydocumented his prior trips on Instagram. The ORB will share Playa space with this year’s headlining temple from Arthur Mamou-Mani: the spiraling Galaxia, a timber tower inspired by the movement of planets, galaxies, and the universe as a whole.
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No word yet if Anish Kapoor will set his sights on the ORB.

BIG has designed and built in Upstate New York a prototypical cabin, known as A45, that can be constructed in any location within four-to-six months. Home company Klein commissioned the prototype, and the company plans that homeowners will be able to order, tailor, and customize the unit to suit their individual needs.
The design is inspired by traditional A-frame cabins, which feature a pitched roof and angled walls that facilitate rain runoff and construction. The design for A45 was created by taking a square base and twisting the roof 45 degrees, resulting in a crystal-like shape that soars to 13 feet in height. The footprint of the tiny cabin is only around 180 square feet, but contains all of the essentials: an open-plan living and sleeping area, a small cooktop, bath, and lofted area.
The house is finished with Douglas fir floors and natural cork walls. The exposed timber frame in solid pine adds to the outside-in feeling of living in the woods.
A star-studded team put together the details of the house. The fireplace is designed by Danish wood-burning stove brand Morsøe, while the kitchen is done by Nordic furniture maker Københavns Møbelsnedkeri. Handcrafted furniture is produced by Danish workshop Carl Hansen, and the bed is fitted by Finnish designer Søren Rose Studio finished with Kvadrat fabric. VOLA-designed fixtures go elegantly with the bathroom made of cedar wood.
The unit is composed of 100% recyclable modules that are assembled on site. The house is elevated off the ground by four concrete piers so that inhabitants can place it in challenging landscapes without the use of heavy machinery.

The first-ever “Hat Party on the High Line” event drew a rowdy crowd of art, culture, fashion, and architecture aficionados to the elevated park last night courtesy of the Friends of the High Line, with proceeds going to support the park’s continued operation and atmosphere of inclusivity.
The night was sponsored by a huge host committee made up of some of architecture’s biggest names (including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, BIG, James Corner Field Operations, Zaha Hadid Architects, Rafael Viñoly Architects, and more) and hosted by Diane von Furstenberg.
Perhaps the biggest draw was the 9:00 PM hat contest, where guests strutted their stuff on a runway in front of judges Alan Cumming, Aki Sasamoto, Florent Morellet, Charles Renfro, NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver, and Vi Vacious and Acid Betty from RuPaul's Drag Race.
Partygoers rose to the challenge and presented their wildest hats, most of them inspired by the plant life and views of the High Line, to raucous applause. While BIG debuted a twisting-tower hat reminiscent of their High Line-topping XI, Zaha Hadid Architects 3D printed a swooping blue and white hat reminiscent of the curves found at 520 West 28th, and other studios including SOM and DS+R all competed to take home the crown.
Ultimately the night was won by Vinayak Portonovo of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), seen modeling the studio’s contribution; a glitzy take on PAU’s plan for the new Penn Station.

The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is getting another crack at designing the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah. After two unsuccessful attempts at renovating the art center’s historically-sensitive current home in 2011, BIG has now been tapped to design the organization’s new permanent home.
BIG had originally proposed two schemes for the art center’s former location on Main Street. Both designs heavily referenced the city’s mining past and resembled different configurations of wooden railroad trestles (albeit with a much more subdued direction for the second plan). After both expansion schemes were rejected by City Hall as being too out of context for the historic neighborhood, the art center left its former home and has been without a permanent location ever since.
Now the organization is eyeing a home in Park City’s new arts and culture district, which comes with a much less restrictive set of zoning regulations. The district is being created whole cloth by City Hall and has locked down Kimball Art Center and the Sundance Institute as their first tenants.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with both the City and BIG on this project,” said Kimball Art Center’s executive director Jory Macomber. “After committing to becoming an anchor tenant in the future arts and culture district, we needed to select an architect that would help us design our new building while staying true to our mission — to inspire and connect through art.”
BIG’s selection is just the first step on the art center’s journey to a new and improved facility. Kimball still has to negotiate ownership of their potential plot with the city, plan the building’s programmatic elements, and conduct community outreach with residents. If everything goes as planned, the new Kimball Art Center should open its doors in 2022.

The year-long Resilient By Design | Bay Area Challenge ideas competition has sought to utilize community-led ecological design to “develop innovative solutions that will strengthen [the Bay Area’s] resilience to sea level rise, severe storms, flooding, and earthquakes.” Last week, the nine teams working with local communities and organizations on the competition unveiled final proposals for a collection of sites scattered around the San Francisco Bay.
The nine sites represent a collection of some of the most ecologically fragile areas in the region, places that may see dramatic change in coming decades as climate change takes hold. The initiative seeks to begin to reposition these areas—some are densely-populated while others host vital regional infrastructure—for a climate change-addled future. For the competition, design teams led by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), James Corner Field Operations (JCFO), Tom Leader Studio (TLS) and others pursue efforts to restore regional wetlands and riparian floodplains while reorienting infrastructural investments and development to suit these new landscapes.
The proposals were developed with an eye toward being implementable strategies. Next, communities and designers will work together with regional, state, and federal agencies to fully implement their plans. All nine proposals are broken down below:
The Grand Bayway
The Common Ground team led by TLS Landscape Architecture proposes to extend Highway 37 across San Pablo Bay by designing an elevated scenic causeway that would allow riparian landscapes to flow beneath the new multi-modal artery. The team proposes to deploy the causeway with flair by breaking out various lanes of travel into whispy overpasses that thread through the landscape including a grand, “mobility loop” encircling rich recreational areas.
The design team is made up of Exploratorium, Guy Nordenson & Assoc., Michael Maltzan Architecture, HR&A Advisors, Sitelab Urban Studio, Lotus Water, Rana Creek, Dr. John Oliver, Richard Hindle, UC Berkeley, and Fehr & Peers Transportation Consultants.
ouR-HOME
The ouR-HOME project proposes to deploy a package of land-use reforms to incentivize small lot housing, community land trusts, social impact bonds, and new community infrastructure to prepare the community of North Richmond for climate change. The proposal calls for the construction of a new “horizontal levee” around the city that will protect it from potentially toxic runoff that could emanate from a nearby gasoline refinery during a flood. The vision also calls for planting 20,000 new trees to help “bring the marsh to Main Street,” an effort that aims to preserve and build upon existing community wealth in the majority African American and Latino enclave.
The team is led by San Francisco-based architecture firm Mithun and includes the Chinatown Community Development Center, ISEEED/Streetwyze, BioHabitats, Integral Group, HR&A Advisors, Moffat & Nichol, ALTA Planning, Urban Biofilter, and Resilient Design Institute.
Estuary Commons
The Estuary Commons plan creates a new network of ecologically-focused public spaces along areas surrounding the estuaries of San Leandro Bay in Alameda County. The proposal calls for investments in bicycle greenways, secondary housing units, and inclusionary zoning reforms in order to “build resiliency within the community.” The social and environmental justice-focused bid also calls for burying a stretch of Interstate-880 running through Downtown Oakland in order to remedy past planning errors.
The All Bay Collective—made up of AECOM, CMG Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley- College of Environmental Design, Berkeley Center for New Media, The Terner Center, California College of the Arts, IDEO, Silvestrum, SKEO, modem, and David Baker Architects— is behind the scheme.
Public Sediment for Alameda Creek
The Public Sediment for Alameda Creek plan calls for reconnecting sediment flows between Alameda Creek and the bay’s wetlands in order to create a natural and ecologically-rich defense against floodwaters. The scheme revisions the currently-static flood control channels that criss-cross the southwestern edge of the Bay into redesigned estuaries, sediment traps, and berms that facilitate the build up of sediment while still allowing for public use and natural habitats.
The team is led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture and also includes Arcadis, Dredge Research Collaborative, TS Studio, UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Design, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, and Buoyant Ecologies Lab.
South Bay Sponge
The South Bay Sponge proposal aims to use a mix of cut-and-fill excavations and zoning swaps to build densely on high ground along the southern edge of the Bay in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The plan would create networks of “sponge” landscapes that absorb tidal flows and run off, efforts that would involve reorganizing urban fabric in these areas into dense nodes of habitation surrounded by water-friendly landscapes.
The design team behind the proposal includes JCFO, Moffatt & Nichol, Magnusson Klemencic Associates, SF BAY National Estuarine Research Reserve, Romberg-Tiburon Center, SFSF, Andrea Baker Consulting, James Lima Planning + Development, The Bay Institute, SeArc / ECOncrete, HT Harvey and Associates, Playhou.se, and Adventure Pictures.
Resilient South City
The Hassell+ team proposes to create additional public green space and a continuous public access route along South San Francisco’s Colma Creek that would double as storm surge-absorbing infrastructure. The plan aims to reduce the impacts of flooding by utilizing a network of greenways and municipal parks to restore native ecologies. These areas would manage runoff from existing neighborhoods, creating new public open spaces along the way. The plan would revamp the city’s urban waterfront and make restorative alterations to Orange Memorial Park.
The project team includes Lotus Water, Civic Edge, HATCH, Brown & Caldwell, Idyllist, and Page & Turnbull.
Islais Hyper Creek
The BIG, ONE, and Sherwood have teamed up for the Islais Hyper Creek
Vision, a plan that aims to restore native landscapes around the creek while creating new nodes of waterborne urbanism. The team envisions transforming vast swaths along the creek into natural habitats and parks, with new clustered technology and industrial hubs scattered around the city. The proposal is dubbed as “an opportunity to bring the existing industrial ecosystem into the next economy.”
The design team also includes Moffat & Nichol, Nelson Nygaard, Strategic Economics, The Dutra Group, and Stanford University.
Designing our Own Solutions
The Permaculture and Social Equity Team is proposing to utilize social design as a way of building a vision for Marin City, a diverse working class enclave located just north of San Francisco. The team’s social design project involved extensive community engagement and is focused on equity, placemaking, and public ownership.
The team is made up of Pandora Thomas, Antonio Roman-Alcala , the Urban Permaculture Institute, Ross Martin Design, Alexander J. Felson, and Yale School of Architecture.
Elevate San Rafael
The Elevate San Rafael plan put forth by the Bionic team that proposes to reorganize the small city of San Rafael, pulling in its edges from flood-prone shorelines while building up higher elevations with dense housing and public infrastructure. The proposal would repurpose underutilized lots into flood planes flanked with housing, add floating recreational islands within the bay, and build up artificial reefs along the bay floor.
The plan proposes to pair “time-tested approaches to coastal adaptation with a moral, financial, and infrastructural agenda” as a way of adequately planning for the city’s future. The team is made up of landscape architects Bionic, WXY, PennDesign, Michael Yarne, Enterprise, Moffatt & Nichol, WRA, RMA, SF State, Baycat, Studio for Urban Projects, RAD Urban, and KMA.
For more information on the proposals, see the Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge website.

On May 11, Arts South Australia’s design jury revealed the design proposals from the six shortlisted teams selected in the Adelaide Contemporary International Design Competition, a planned art gallery and sculpture park in Adelaide, Australia. The 160,000 square-foot Adelaide Contemporary will house a significant portion of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s 42,000 piece collection, which currently only has a fraction on display due to a lack of space. The museum will draw upon its substantial Aboriginal collection to create the Gallery of Time, which will combine indigenous pieces with European and Asian works. This shortlist's designs follow. Adjaye Associates & BVN’s design draws upon Aboriginal vernacular architecture through the use of a surrounding canopy, providing shade in one of the more arid corners of the country. With the canopy screening significant portions of the four elevations, the design will largely use skylights and balconies to filter natural light into the central atrium and stairwell.With a twisting, serpentine layout, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) & JPE’s proposal is inspired by Aboriginal sand painting, which often embeds abstract natural elements within a landscape. Through the use of rooftop landscaping, the team hopes to integrate their design with the adjacent Botanic Garden.David Chipperfield and SJB Architects’ is the only timber structure proposal. The principal elevations are composed of wooden screens, and the structure is topped by sloped roofs.In a statement, Diller Scofidio+Renfro & Woods Bagot describe their proposal as a “matrix of unique spaces unbound by disciplinary categories range in size, height, infrastructure, and light quality.” The bulk of exhibition space is located on the second story, which is cantilevered over an outdoor gallery and public square.Hassell & SO-IL incorporate a central plaza into their design proposal, which the team describes as an attempt to bring “nature, art, and people together.” The central plaza serves as a circulation node and public square connecting the gallery’s semi-independent spaces, which are further laced together by a draped, metal brise-soleil.Khai Liew, Ryue Nishizawa & Durbach Block Jaggers proposal consists of a sweeping, perforated canopy supported by a series of pilotis. Beneath the canopy, the site is split roughly evenly between park and curatorial space, the latter presenting sweeping views of the adjacent Botanic Garden.Arts South Australia’s design jury will meet again in May, with a winner expected to be announced in June.

In Manhattan, there are two things we keep seeing everywhere: WeWork and Bjarke Ingels. From its signature coworking office spaces to an elementary school, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann seems intent on infiltrating every aspect of people’s lives. According to WeWork’s blog, the plan “starts with every space for every member and scales to every building in every city.”
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is also cropping up around NYC (quite literally as the BIG U will encircle downtown Manhattan) as well as VIA 57 West, Two World Trade, 40th Precinct Police Station, the Spiral at Hudson Yards, and the Eleventh.
With all of this in mind, it seems inevitable that the two would team up for dual domination: WeWork has hired Ingels as its first “chief architect.” Ingels will continue to lead his offices out of Copenhagen and London as he creates more WeWork spaces.
“WeWork was founded at the exact same time as when I had arrived to New York. In that short amount of time – the blink of an eye at the time scale of architecture–they have accomplished incredible things and they are committed to continuing their trajectory to places we can only imagine. WeWork’s commitment to community and culturally driven development is perfectly aligned with our active, social and environmental agendas. As WeWork takes on larger and more holistic urban and architectural challenges, I am very excited to contribute with my insights and ideas to extend their community-oriented vision to ground-up buildings and urban neighborhoods,” Ingels said in a statement.
His first task will be to transform the former Lord & Taylor building into WeWork’s new headquarters. He is also working on the aforementioned school, WeGrow. As Fast Company reported, Neumann and Ingels have a shared, confident vision:

“I [Neumann] said, ‘Give me your favorite building.’
“He [Ingels] said, ‘I don’t have one favorite building because of the design-by-committee situation. I get one or three amazing original ideas that I’ve been working on for a decade in a building, but there were seven other ideas that were not exactly mine.’
“I said, ‘I want all your best ideas in one building.’
“He said, ‘If someone actually allowed me to do it, I could design the perfect office building or perfect residential building.’
“I said, ‘Perfect, that’s a big word.’
“He said, ‘No one’s ever given me a shot.'”

Bjarke Ingels Group’s twin rotating towers are under construction along the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Eleventh (also known as the XI) will include luxury residences, multiple restaurants, retail, an art area and a new public promenade adjacent to The High Line. The project joins nearby buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, and Renzo Piano, among others.

The two towers, one each on the east (No. X) and west (No. I) portion of the site, will rise to 300 feet and 400 feet, respectively. Each are clad in a travertine composite facade expressive of the underlying concrete structure behind it, with expansive punched windows with a bronze finish. “With its punched windows and gridded structural facade, The Eleventh echoes the pragmatic rationality of the neighborhood’s historic warehouses, while its sculptural geometry gives it a kinship to the local arts community,” Bjarke Ingels, founding partner of BIG, said in a statement. “The past and present of Chelsea [are] merging in a new hybrid identity.” The choice of materials helps the pair stand out among the surrounding concrete and steel structures. The facade combines high-performance composite technology with the durable travertine to reduce the dead load on the structure. The panels are composed of a thin layer of travertine with an aluminum honeycomb core which provided a lightweight solution and an easier fabrication and installation as an alternative to hand-cut travertine. The design contains multiple ruled surfaces which resulted in challenges in the process of detailing the facade system. The travertine is flat, rigid material and, as such, the facade required the ruled surfaces to be panelized with a roughly four-by-eight-foot grid.This arrangement resulted in a number of unique panel shapes and sizes. To follow the geometry, the panels are offset to one another and scaled. Since the travertine is one inch thick, the scaled panels require a travertine return to avoid any open gaps. During the design process, BIG and the facade consultants were forced to evaluate the travertine panel variation versus the window module size variation and, for various reasons, the window modules became the organizational device for the facade.Sitting within the geometry of the building is a series of unitized curtain wall windows that punch through the facade. While designing these apertures, BIG, alongside architect of record Woods Bagot and building envelope consultant GMS, looked at a unitized system which would be suspended in front of the floor slabs but, due to the complexity of the structure, the curtain wall will span between each slab. The unitized system is a structurally glazed, aluminum and glass curtain wall system with a bronze finish.As the renderings of the project show, the unitized system is met with an aluminum metal composite panel enclosure with the same bronze finish as the curtain wall. Due to the complexity of the facade, all elements were custom engineered and fabricated.

The twisting, torquing towers of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)-designed The Eleventh (The XI) have begun sprouting along the High Line, and developer HFZ Capital has released a new batch of renderings.
Located between 10th and 11th Avenue and bounded by 17th and 18th Streets in Manhattan, The Eleventh takes up a full block directly south of the Frank Gehry-designed IAC building. As HFZ told the New York Times, the mixed-use project was designed less as a standalone complex and more as a “micro-neighborhood.”
The sprawling development stretches underneath the High Line to the east, where James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro are designing a street-level extension of the park above. Moving west from the new park, the BIG-designed pavilions will rise under the High Line.
The two travertine-clad towers will rise on the western half of the development next to the Hudson River. At the westernmost edge of the site will be the taller of the two towers, at 400 feet tall and 36 floors, with 149 condos units designed by New York’s Gabellini Sheppard. For the interiors, the team has chosen a lighter material palette that emphasizes natural materials, such as oak flooring and white quartzite countertops.
The smaller tower to the east, connected at its base with its neighbor via a glass skybridge, will only be about 300 feet tall and 26 stories. Everything after floor 11 is slated for condos, while the lower floors will hold a Six Senses hotel; the Paris-based interiors firm Gilles & Boissier are designing the interiors for both the residential and hotel sections, and will reportedly use a similar palette and style for both.
Both towers noticeably twist in opposite directions as they rise, and the turns are intended to preserve views for occupants inside both buildings. To further improve the views, the western tower will expand as it rises and the eastern tower will taper as it nears the top. To cap it off, both of the condo buildings share matching glass crowns.
A shorter building is also planned for the site’s southwestern corner, with plans to turn it into an art space and Six Senses spa and club. Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea will be designing a covered through-way for vehicles and a courtyard at the center between the two tower’s hemispheres.
The amenities are consistent with the other luxury residential buildings going up along the High Line; future homeowners can expect access to a 75-foot-long pool, 4,000-square-foot fitness center, access to Six Senses, and a lounge and game room in the skybridge. Once completed at the end of 2019, the complex will be among the tallest in West Chelsea.